Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi - Leading Intellectual of Our Time

6^th Annual Conference

Islam in Europe

 

A Celebration of the Main Mosque of Granada

 

 

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

Leading Intellectual of Our Time

By Abdullah Luongo

 

 

In 1968 I was living in Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts where I had made friends with a student from Bard College, an elite liberal arts college nestled in the Adirondack Mountains of upper New York State, who, having taken a gap year, was in Cambridge working at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. He and I would sit on the stoop of the book shop and read The Cantos of Ezra Pound. My friend was learning Chinese to help with the ideograms Pound used. I recall the last conversation we had where he said he thought Pound was the greatest poet of the 20^th century but had gotten derailed by quacky economic theories. I had no response. Not then. It would be 25 years later that I would write a small book that took off from a quote by Hugh Kenner, in my view the greatest Poundian scholar, that ‘Pound’s ideas of money and credit were not extrinsic to the Cantos, but rather its warp and woof.’

 

That I came to write that modest contribution to the vast opus of extant Pound scholarship was, of course, the direct result of my being encouraged to undertake that endeavour by Shaykh Abdalqadir, and which began here, in Granada, while living in this beautiful city. The theme of usury, or usura, as Pound called it, only found its full clarification within the illuminating field that had been opened up by the extraordinary intellect of a man who was, first of all, the leading Muslim intellectual of his time and moreover a  Shaykh of sufism. The identifying of this root cause of injustice, which we define as riba, an un-natural increase in the transaction, has been one of the paramount tasks of the Shaykh and an essential part of his ongoing diagnosis necessary for the full recovery of the Deen of Islam in our time. Out from that illuminated clearing made possible by Shaykh Abdalqadir emerged the groundbreaking exposition, extrapolated from the Madinian amal of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, into the 21^st century, by the now famous scholarship of Umar Ibrahim Vadillo.

 

In speaking about Shaykh Abdalqadir today and his being the foremost intellectual of this time, I needed to connect to my own journey which began when I was as young man, [sitting on the stoop] and subsequently the importance of our honouring the highest aspirations of the young people amongst us. This passing on and transmitting of whatever it is of understanding Allah has favoured us with is a seminal element in Shaykh Abdalqadir’s teaching. The educating of our youth together with the dynamics of an ongoing dawa is the clear affirmation of Allah having honoured us with the highest Deen, and the only one acceptable to Him. Where ever this is taking place is where the authentic work of Shaykh Adbalqadir is happening.

 

I am reminded from our studies at Dallas Institute in Cape Town of Shakespeare’s Richard II, which we have just completed, and certain un-enviable words of Richard, held prisoner in Pomfret Castle awaiting his inevitable death where he says, “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Therefore, we take heed and use this time wisely. That we have gathered here to honour a man of knowledge is a most excellent use of our time and moreover an absolute delight, for the knowledge of this one man and what Allah has honoured him with is a means of guidance for Muslims all over the world.  

 

It is the encounter itself that brings with it fresh growth and understanding. Henry James, the American novelist, said that consciousness is a shared experience and that when you enter into the place of knowing then the ones who did not see begin to see. The people of seeing take those who want to know and bring them to the place from where they look, as if to say, ‘look, look from here.’ This grasping of the event by being in the company of one who sees is an opening to the understanding that truly Allah is the Seeer. The scintillating insight through the detailed observations of the acute consciousness of Henry James, as it moves almost imperceptibly through his novels, is just one of the many profound delights that pour out continuously from being in the company of the Shaykh.

 

I began my preparation for coming here to Granada by re-reading The Shield of Achilleus, given as a talk in 1987 in Majorca by the Shaykh. His talk was precisely an unfolding, an opening up of a way of looking that enables us to see in a way that has always been before us, but has been obfuscated by layers of ignorance imprinted on us from our earliest childhood, then on through to the shock of puberty – devoid in modern society of any intrinsic meaning, of an understanding of our awakened sex, or an understanding of the world we find ourselves in. Young adults are adrift in a warped view of what they are told is reality and what life holds for them, who then attempt to obtain an education to prepare for a world that becomes their prison. It is more a need to de-code and be free of what one has already learned by an enforced patterning in order to begin a true education, a paideia, as known by the early Greeks, making ready the student to receive the shattering force of the ancient natural religion of Ibrahim. Remember, when Ibrahim, still a youth, who having smashed the idols of his society, save one rather large one, said, ‘That one did it -don’t blame me.’

 

It is then a way of being (what Heidegger called dasein), that embodies a way of looking at the world (weltanschauung) that Shaykh Abdalqadir is able to open for us. Importantly, the Shaykh is not a door or passage but a guide who indicates a way that we can take, as much as we are ready to take it, to reach for our highest possibility. As so much of what each one of us is has been determined, as our DNA is the encoded pattern from which the design of us emerges, one most essential element we carry forward for this heroic task is to desire it. Together with this desire the other key element is that we must have – from when we were in our early childhood – been loved. The one who desires freedom, here the Shaykh prefers the term freiheit, and to reach their highest possibility, has to have been loved, and then they, in turn, can love. What the Shaykh says about this in his Book of Hubb when he gives us an insight into the ayat of Qur’an where Allah says: Say, “If you love Allah, then follow me and Allah will love you and forgive you for your wrong actions. Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful” is, he instructs us, a key to one of Allah’s great secrets.

 

I refer again to the Shield of Achilleus. We all know the story of Achilles from Homer’s poem – actually a song, the Iliad. Achilles had a choice, which was, when taken, in fact his destiny, and that was (to quote from the Shaykh’s text) “either dying young in glory, or a long life surrounded by his family and his wealth on the land.” We know from the story that when Achilles refused to fight because of his being angry with Agamemnon it precipitated disaster for the Greeks. Now he was not at the gates of Troy for Greece, for a State or for anything other than for himself. Yes, the war was over Helen, but Achilles fought for Achilles. Therefore, when confronted with the situation he had to either challenge Hector or loose his honour, and he, of course, makes the famous decision to fight. What was then and still is at stake is whether there will be free men able to choose their highest possibility. What you realise is that that choice, which is against the bourgeois drive, is, at the same time, what (again quoting the Shaykh’s text) ‘defends the whole of natural existence’, for that picture of life – with a city at peace, another domain at war and fields of wheat, the grape vines, fine youths and fair maidens, is we learn the very design on the shield of Achilleus.

 

What Shaykh Abdalqadir is speaking of is not an erudite academic exercise, but an existential encounter with our self of the utmost exigency. The man must go out, not stay at home. His project can not be his family and his business to support it. He must have a higher project and it is that he establishes justice. D.H. Lawrence saw that that man, “with that spark in him” was the endangered specie, under threat by what he called the “money man”. The new economic man fears the censure of the other, and therefore the negative discourse begins: that his wife may complain, that the mother-in-law would berate him. It is not that he does not take care, but that he should not be enslaved under an imposed tyranny. The father-in-law may appear to be successful yet has long since faded from himself, as T.S. Elliot called them ‘the hollow men…the stuffed men.’ But society says you must be responsible – to the family, to the mother and what of the children and their needs! How can he go off and be so irresponsible? So what on earth is this business of the heroic?

 

We are in an age where everyone has been turned in an accountant, conscientiously going to work each day to count the money that not only is not really there, but is not real. And yet we are bound to it. The terrible thing is that if you stay back and make this thing you call ‘my family’ your project - then the first victims are nearly always the children. That whole pattern of ‘natural life’ that was the design of Achilles’ shield is protected precisely by not staying back.

 

With Achilles we remember his story - that he did die young in glory. We sing the song of Odysseus, who reached the shores of old age…….but not because he stayed at home.

 

This was the sunnah of the first community of the Rasul, sullalahu alaihi wa salem, and was held to wherever the Deen was strong. With the emergence of this kind of man, with the temerity to speak the truth, whose outward project is justice and whose inner being is illuminated, who Nietzsche called ‘a bridge to the overman’, will be the woman who desires him, and they together are what Shaykh Abdalqadir identifies as the ‘collaborative couple.’

 

 

I should like to attempt to present a picture to you as a landscape, if you permit me, which is built-up by means of overlaying composite images that you will have the task of keeping in mind. The effect, if successful, will be a contextual field of vision whereby you will see something in a way that you may not have previously. This original approach, what I would call an artistic approach, but artistic in way that Leonardo De Vinci and the Renaissance movement of his time was, as you all know, also highly scientific, is a determining feature to the ‘how’ of how Shaykh Abdalqadir shows something that in our seeing it can [can] make an opening in our grasping, by means of recognition, something that was not actually hidden but, nevertheless, not seen. I will take from a theme that has on numerous occasions been presented in Shaykh Abdalqadir’s writing, for example, in The Shield of Archilleus (which I have mentioned), in The Technique of the Coup de Banque, and The Time of The Bedouin, as well as other of his brilliant web site articles that have been available over these recent years. Not withstanding a recognisable complexity in this modus operandi, it is not at all complicated.

 

Just as we began with the age of the poets, in particular Homer and he being our means of access to the consciousness of the hero, we took Achilles, and could have ended with Alexander, we now look at the philosophers. We make a speedy ascent to Plato and focus on the underlying theme of The Republic and to a certain extent, The Symposium.  These texts allow us to say that the fundamental ‘question of the philosophers’ was how and in what manner is society best set up and governed to assure the prosperity and harmony of its people. Needless to say, democracy was not on the top of Plato’s list, and Aristotle, often in disagreement with Plato’s assessments, also saw democracy as a digression, just as he said ‘monarchy could digress into tyranny and aristocracy into rule by an oligarchy’. Throughout the ages these men we call philosophers have grappled with this theme and other extenuating themes pertaining to ‘man’ as an object in their subject dominated sentences. In referring to this activity the Shaykh says that all of what Aristotle wrote took place in the realm between his ears and his tongue. The Shaykh adds that the truly great accomplishment of Aristotle was not his philosophy but Alexander, his pupil, and we do not know what he taught him but only what Alexander the Great did when he went out into the world and did it. The momentum of his heroic life propelled Greece on another 300 years after his death, until we track the destruction and end of Greek Civilization by the onslaught of a group of Jewish immigrants who came and settled in Greece with a new religion, Christianity.

 

We move now to the modern age where we have in the philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) an all-encompassing system of thinking where he says ‘everything is a manifestation of spirit’. One could say that there is no place left to go as everything has been invested with spiritual meaning. Precisely now there emerges someone the Shaykh describes as ‘like a character from a children’s story comes this wild figure Marx, and all he does, like a juggler, is turn the whole thing up-side-down’. He turns Hegel up-side-down. He says, “No,[everything is not spirit] everything is matter”. Marx called this ‘dialectical materialism.’ The Shaykh continues by saying, ‘And along comes another of these jugglers, Freud, and he [Freud] says, “The Christians are wrong, there is no soul, no higher spirit. What you thought was a higher spirit is an unconscious drive. It is not just an Unconscious, it is an unconscious drive.” Therefore, instead of a spirit that reigns, you have an energy which is driving, and you are not in the driver’s seat.’ The exposition of the Shaykh continues. ‘Then comes the third clown, a scientific Harpo Marx, and this is Einstein, and he declares a relativity of knowledge.’ [Everything is relative] The last life-line is cut. While Einstein’s ‘relativity theory’ has been packed away into the storage archives in favour of more accurate theorems, the damage is done and we are left with nothing other than his other major contribution to the human race, the atom bomb.

 

These three figures unleashed a plague that impacted on the modern age in a way far more devastating than any Medieval Black Plague ravaged the body of Europe. I would add one other name that appears in the mid 20^th century, Jacque Derrida, who is the inheritor of the three, and whose philosophy has exerted an inordinate influence on the entire academic world. The Shaykh has referred to the outcome of the campaign of the three famous clowns as the deconstruction, or more appropriately he says, the destruction of a higher view of man and his ascent through self-knowledge to knowledge of the Devine. The father of the mid 20^th century Deconstructionists is Jacques Derrida, whose main axiom is, “There is nothing beyond the text.” He then goes on to say that as words have no absolute meaning, that they [as signifiers] are open to an unlimited range of interpretations. To attempt to follow his train of thought is to descend into a dark quagmire without any hope of finding a way to the light of day. The brilliant Michel Foucault called Derrida an ‘obfuscating terrorist’ as his thinking is nothing less than ‘contradictory paradoxes’ that lead no where and when one states that they do not make sense, Derrida retorts that your not understanding him is that you are stupid, hence the ‘terrorist’ appellation by Foucault.

 

 

Against this background (in our landscape painting) the Shaykh brings out another view originating from the Greeks (which we began with) and is brought into the modern age by Wagner and Ibsen in the 19^th century and Junger in the 20^th. Ibsen’s plays Ghosts and The Doll House are works, as those of the first Greek tragedians were, that can bring about a disturbing yet liberating catharsis within bourgeois capitalist society. These three men open up a clearing in human consciousness that allows man to move out from his disasters, to an understanding of Being that can set him free from the dark prison within which he finds himself. We must hold all this and move now to the final chapter of the Time of the Bedioun. Here the Shaykh makes a concordance with Junger, the last of his generation and a great German intellectual, who said that he was himself ‘an end not a beginning,’ who is both able to embrace technique as the defining aspect of the modern world [this is unavoidable for all of us] while also drawing from the antecedents of the Homeric tradition, the heroic age. We would then call Junger a poet, in the classical sense, as was Homer.

 

The next step is to join Junger’s vision of the “clearing in the forest” towards which 21^st century man must make his way, and this is not an idyllic place as you might imagine from the height of German Romanticism, but rather an inner condition, and connect it to the three stages outlined by Ibn Khaldun in the 14^th century in his master work The Muqaddima.  The first of those stages is what is defined as Bedouinism (this is clearly nothing to do with what we all understand as Nomadism) which, to quote from Shaykh Abdalqadir’s text, ‘implies a dynamic movement of men in contradistinction to a prior settled culture’. ‘The Bedou is outside the urban system.’ This is no less true where, the Shaykh relates, ‘he is in it’. After some time the numbers of such people increases and they begin to recognise one another and subsequently come together. This coming together is the most powerful force social man can experience. ‘It is kinship but not of blood.’ It transcends the family, a tribe or a nation. It is what Ibn Khaldun defined as Asabiyya, and it is the 2ed stage. In the best of modern translations this term is translated as ‘esprit de corps’ which is very close although still not complete in its understanding, as this (quoting the Shaykh) special ‘unifying bond of brotherhood …is more than that… as it has in it an added moral evaluation as in the term Futuwwa, chivalry, or nobility of character.’ This is the final 3ed stage. Conclusively, we can clearly hear him, O most excellent in character, sullahu alaihi wa salem, when he says: “I have not come but to perfect good character in men.” 

 

What takes place in the final chapter of The Time of The Bedouin brings into play all the elements of a highly detailed and meticulously researched study that has taken the French Revolution as its epicentre, and then brings into focus with such startling celerity a full blown canvas of staggering proportions that one must go back to it again and again and reflect on its meanings. It is a masterpiece!

 

To conclude I have taken from the wisdom of The Hikam of Ibn Ata’illah where he says: “What a difference between one who proceeds from Allah his argumentation and the one who proceeds inferentially to Him! He who has Him as his starting point knows the Real (Haqq) as It is, and proves any matter by reference to the being of its Origin.” The intellectual perspicacity of Shaykh Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi emanates from an inviolable knowledge of the absolute Oneness of Allah, a pure Tawhid. This is his teaching.

 

 His intellect, something by which Allah has honoured him, is firmly bound, as in the Arabic word ‘akl for intellect, which derives from the root of the word for the cord which is used to hobble a camel and makes to stay. Therefore, the greatest intellect of this age is coiled in the green turban of the lovers and defenders of the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and prostrates before the Majesty and Greatness of Allah. The intellectual argument of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi is that he says, from the book of Allah, “Say: Allah! And leave them plunging in their games.” With this the kufar are confounded and driven to fury. Faced with the conundrums of this age, Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi draws his Alexandrian sword and standing before the Gordian Knot which the oracles say will be undone by the one who will be Lord of all Asia, he cuts it through! No argument! Allahu Akbar!

 

As salammu alaikum      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

  

   

 

 

The Albatross

The Albatross

 

Often the idle mariners at sea

Catch albatrosses, vast birds of the deep,

Companions which follow lazily

Across the bitter gulfs the gliding ship.

 

They’re scarcely set on deck, these heavenly kings,

Before, clumsy, abashed, full of shame,

They piteously let their great white wings

Beside them drag, oar-like, and halt and lame.

 

See this winged traveller, so awkward, weak!

He was so fine: how droll and ugly now!

One sailor sticks a cutty in his beak,

Another limps to mock the bird that flew!

 

The Poet’s like the monarch of the clouds

Who haunts the tempest, scorns the bows and slings;

Exiled on earth amid the shouting crowds,

He cannot walk, for he has giant’s wings.

 

Charles Baudelaire

Translated by Joanna Richardson

 

Reflection on L’Albatros by Robert Luongo

 

Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

Some years ago I had been living in Spain

And restlessness overcame me, and I searched the horizon.

“I shall visit my friend in England:

“He resides in a hamlet outside of town.”

The savant was silent then said no not to go.

“He is the person to see if you need crutches,

“What you need are wings!”

 

 

 

The End of the Age of the Republic

'Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.'

 

Brutus in Act II, scene i:63-65, from Julius Caesar

 
We hear Brutus as he privately contemplates the impending murder of Caesar, in what is recognisable as a pre-emptive strike against a would-be tyrant. Caesar is a de facto king in all but name, yet we are told “three times he did refuse the crown.” For Brutus the action against Caesar is not a case of someone needing to rationalise to themselves the doing of a thing, as he is clearly convinced of his ideological, as well as moral, high-ground. Unlike Hamlet, who equivocates as the task before him pushes the limits of what he can endure, Brutus has no such dilemma, but rather an inveterate pride cloaked within the public persona of being the defender of the Roman Republic. These are exalted and high-minded ideals, such that others are to die for. He is a would-be stoic and every bit the modern man of the political class, and so it is not at all surprising that Robespierre, France’s famous first citizen, should have been so enamoured by this celebrated character.

 

Mark Anthony was Caesar’s friend and stands in opposition, while asking permission of Brutus to speak. In the most powerful and efficacious political speech on record, he turns the tide of support for the ‘liberators’ against them. Anthony is accused of being an ambitious Machiavellian who uses the funeral eulogy of Caesar to “unleash the dogs of war” (Act III, scene i) as he beats the drum of the explosive leitmotif: “And Brutus is an honourable man” (Act III, scene ii), until the populace are drawn into a rage against Brutus and his co-conspirators whom only moments earlier they were cheering.   

 

With Robespierre we have the pivotal figure of the French Revolution who casts himself in the leading role of the famous Roman patrician. Was not Robespierre also a chaste and honourable man; principled and virtuous? And did he not embrace the unassailable principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity upon which the French Republic stands, and with such passionate reverence that thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen should die for what he believed?

 

Brutus, like Richard II, was a mirror-gazer. Richard did not like what he saw, for in the famous usurpation scene, when he called for a mirror to be brought, he still looked a king, “O, flattering glass!” (Act IV, scene i), which he then saw to be totally false, and smashed it. He had been un-kinged, first by Bolingbroke, then by his own volition as he violently separated ‘the two bodies of the king’ by dashing his public persona of monarch into a thousand shards of glass.

 

Brutus, on the other hand, liked what he saw. Therefore, when Cassius says: “Tell me good Brutus, can you see your face” (Act I, scene ii), Brutus answers his question in optics by stating that only by reflection can someone see themselves. Cassius has him, for while the other conspirators were simply suborned with the promise of secured trading concessions and retaining political favours, Brutus is roped in by his deep-rooted rectitude upheld by the high-minded democratic principles of the Republic. When Brutus looks into the metaphorical mirror held up to him by Cassius:

 

“I, your glass

        Will modestly discover to yourself

        That of yourself which you yet know not of,”

 

he (unlike Richard) likes what he sees. One can sense that Brutus has gazed upon himself in private to view his impeccable public image.   

 

Marat, the popular political philosopher and journalist, exhibited the pragmatic modalities of the Revolution. Marat’s thinly veiled enmity for the enshrined citizen, whom he gloriously championed in his writings, made clear that people were simply not capable of being in charge of something as important as their liberty. The freedom of ‘The People’ must be protected at all costs. This became a matter of National Security. Marat assured the citizens that the threat was everywhere, a virtual ‘code red’ and that counter-revolutionaries were entrenched in every dark corner, lurking in the shadows of society and, moreover, that the only way to assure the protection of Freedom was to purge the State of its enemies. If the body-politic was infected then the treatment was to bleed it. These enemies were not citizens protected by law but non-citizens, dehumanised, secret enemy combatants whose very existence threatened the safety and security of the Nation. Everyone must be vigilant. Complacency is tantamount to treason. Suspicion casts its hard cold stare as everyone comes under surveillance. They were outlaws, outside the Law, and therefore, the manner of dealing with them operates by the rule of exception outside the juridical process, so that the otherwise inalienable rights, civil liberties, did not apply. This does not break the law, but rather works outside of it by the establishment of a state of emergency. The Terror of the French Revolution drove the machinery of the modern democratic State that ratified the torture and execution of so many thousands of Frenchmen in the name of Liberty.

 

While we do know that Robespierre admired Brutus, we have no such proof that Marat, the relentless broadsheet propagandist (the mass media of the eighteenth century) was ever so enamoured by the bony Cassius.

 

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar remains an important play, very much relevant to our modern age. Caesar posed a potential threat to the very foundations of the Roman Republic. If he were to become king it would “put the sting in him”, against which no free Roman citizen would be safe. “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more” (Act III, scene ii) is the basis of Brutus’ argument when he painstakingly explains to the crowd why it was for their own good that Caesar had to be killed, or “sacrificed” as he said, for the greater good. “Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to all live as free men?”  Earlier in the play (Act II, scene i) we hear Brutus, after having been found more malleable than Cassius had originally thought possible, contemplating his impending action.

 

        “It must be by his death; and for my part

        I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

        But for the general. He would be crown’d:

        How that might change his nature, there’s the question.”

 

At the end of the same reflection, Brutus concludes:

 

        “And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,

        Which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous,

        And kill him in the shell.” 

 

Cassius, defeated by Anthony’s accomplished army, orders his own servant to stab him as he cries out, “Caesar, thou art revenged, / Even with the sword that killed thee.” Brutus, on the other hand, has repelled the forces of Octavius, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, who upon hearing of his uncle’s murder returns to Rome. But when Brutus finds Cassius dead and his army lost, he too looses heart and runs on the sword of his servant Volumnius. When Anthony finds the body of Brutus he comments:

 

“This was the noblest Roman of them all.

        All the conspirators save one only he

        Did that they did in envy of great Caesar…” (Act V, scene v).

 

Young Octavius (he was still in his teens) orders the body of Brutus to be buried “With all respect and rites”, and declares an end to the battle.

 

Only the most educated of Shakespeare’s audience would have been moderately familiar with the (44 BC Roman) Republican form of government, or its much earlier Greek antecedent. For them Caesar’s murder was regicide. No modern audience (dating from the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century) has ever cast Brutus in less than a heroic light, with Caesar as the dangerous dictator. What is remarkable is that Shakespeare prefigured an age that had not yet arrived.

 

The key to the richness of Shakespeare’s plays is the language itself, as it unlocks all the myriad meanings. His remarkable genius is in how he wonderfully sets the stage and then refrains from imposing a demagogic or ideological hold on the action. Consequently, fresh thematic insights and character interpretations continue to emerge in each successive age. This is true now, as we approach the end of the Age of the Republic.

 

A Dying Poet

Jadis, si je souviens bien, ma vie était un festin ou s'ouvraient tous les coeurs,

 ou tous les vins coulaient.

 

From Une Saison En Enfer by Arthur Rimbaud

 

 

'What thou lovest well remains,

                                the rest is dross

What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee'

 

                                From Canto LXXXI of The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound

 

 

A Dying Poet

 

 

Rimbaud got away; he got out young.

With a second Saison en Enfer, he travelled delirious, back to France from Abyssinia. A torturous journey, overland on a rude litter, typically reserved for the dead. By sea left for days unattended without food or water.

 

The last of the dross burnt away.

His leg amputated in hospital in Marseilles.

 

A heated arrival at Roche met with the same cold censure, reserved for her 'profligate son', although a little sister had grown up, sympathetic, someone to talk to, to tell his amazing tales. A mother grown yet even harder, more small.

 

He would have to leave all over again.

He could not die there in that place.

 

Isabelle would bring him poppy-seed tea, made from their garden flower bed to ease the horrid pain and incessant fever. The floor of his little room covered with woven prayer mats he'd brought with him from Harar. They said he would recite strange 'oriental verses', as in a trance. One night woken from a dream having forgotten his condition sprang from his bed to see through an open window the moon rise luminous and fell crashing to the floor.

 

He had, like his father, whom he'd never met, who while stationed in Algeria as a Legionnaire governor learnt Arabic and made an early translation of Qur'an into French, also learnt Arabic and with the assistance of his house servant, Djami, they would recite. Djami married a girl from the local village, and at twenty became a young father to a little daughter, a little light, like playful fireflies in the night. And so he would often speak of his faithful friend, who he dearly loved, sometimes calling Isabelle by his name, and how he wanted to return to Africa with a bride and have a family. After a short month lasting a near eternity he set off by train with his sister accompanying him. He was by all accounts terribly unwell, unfit for even the shortest trip let alone an arduous and now impossible journey back to Africa. In Paris they had to change stations and continue on to Lyon, then another train to Marseilles. Upon his arrival he was immediately brought to the hospital of the Immaculate Conception, which he would never leave. The doctors told Isabelle that any hope of recovery was futile and the end was near. They, on the other hand, fed Arthur unpalatable encouragement. Whenever he was conscious his sister would work on him to convert to Catholicism, and accept the holy Sacrament. What stale bread for a sublime poet whose visions poured from the Unseen. 

 

 

                                                Robert Luongo

 

Standing by Words

 

B

irches bend beneath the weight to young lads

Climbed atop their supple branches

Springing back with the sap of Dionysus

 

Lost to a bitched world gone bad in the teeth

            that cannot come to grips

Rotten brickwork in city slums

            Held together by fetid mortar

 

Nations with its millions un-employed boosts the

Number of passive receptors:

      Sodom of Thames . . .

heralds' conditions of imposed unemployment and that of being passive recipients of all that you are shamefully made to accept. Sodom on Thames is clipped from Canto CV by Ezra Pound, the twentieth century master of epic verse. While Sodom was that wicked city in ancient Palestine notorious for vice and corruption, the specific event Mr. Pound was referring to was the battle of Waterloo, 1815, that provided an opportunity for the Rothschild Banking Family to make an unprecedented fortune out of events. Jacob Rothschild, a Paris banker, had the earliest news (with an agent close at hand to the battle) of a French defeat. Word was sent (some say by carrier pigeon) to his brother Nathan, a London banker, to spread the news that the French had won and Napoleon was on the march to London. This caused an immediate panic on the London Gold Market, spurred on further by Nathan's rapid selling off of gold shares. Everyone holding shares began to sell for whatever they could get, fearing the worst with Napoleon's army soon to be entering the capitol. Before the close of business Nathan bought back everything he could get his hands on. By nightfall word arrived that the English had won, and Napoleon had retreated in defeat, but not before the house of Rothschild had made a staggering profit at the country's expense.

      The implicit association between sodomy and fraud was not an original one by Pound, for he was thoroughly familiar with Dante's Divina Commedia. It, of course, was the earlier poet who cast Sodomites and Usurers, those that commit fraud by cheating through interest-taking or any manipulation to the value of money, into the same circle of hell for their acts against nature. Dante, in turn, drew his reference from the Canon Law of the Church that prohibited both acts and condemned those who practised them.

 

B

anks payout "say" four percent on

                                    cash deposits

  then automatically double their holdings

           counting them twice

as both cash on hand

                                   And capital to rent

Making it ex nihil by law

So many times over actual deposits from

all John Thrifty's.

                        Legal privilege of

 BANKERS ONLY

passed into LAW by your representatives.

 

Any bank offers a certain annual percentage rate to those who deposit money with them. It may be four point something or five point this or that. The key point is the little understood mechanism known as the 'fractional-reserve system.'

            Furthermore, the banks double their holdings precisely by those laws that allow private banks to record all savings deposited with them as both monies available to be lent out, with interest of course, while at the same time saying it was all there in the bank, if and when people wanted it back. Therefore, it is doubled, something out of nothing, created ex nihil, from the Latin, found in the codex of early Roman law. One such law in the US was the National Banking Act of 1864-65, which firmly established the control of issuing credit and currency in the hands of private banks. Mr. Lincoln was dead set against the Act and by more accurate accounts was the reason why he never saw the final one. Latter developments such as the Federal Reserve System, established in 1913, and the Bretton Woods of 1944 were other dramatic milestones. This wresting of control and power to create was firmly established by laws all passed through both "houses", the legislature and congress, allowing the private interests of bankers to do what no other business or individual or the nation itself, for what matter can: multiply their assets by some magical number (at times as much as ten) then lend again credit on that exaggerated amount, issued on worthless paper at interest rates of 13, 14, 15% or more! This ain't taught in school and no modern course in economics ever touches it.

 

F

Orgotten Jefferson said: "You can

Set up in the occupation of lender

If you have it to lend."

                   T.J. read a book or two

 and damn well knew of William Patterson,

Founder of B of E in 1693' or four

who wrote to prospective shareholder:

The bank hath benefit of all monies

which it creates out of nothing."

Crime of the centuries and case

 still unheard.

Return to school book arithmetic

Add bank's deficit of lent money

to your government gets posted in their books

not as debit but an asset (damn blasted)

which, again is multiplied by: times X and

paid for in more taxes

handed back to bank with

Guaranty written on your backsides.

            (Culpability not erasable).

 

     Imagine a plain classroom with an earnest schoolmaster equipped with a long pointer that taps persistently at a simple math equation written on the blackboard. The point is that when a bank lends money to the government, they (banks) don't record it as a debit from their available funds, but are allowed by law to record it as an asset. What this boils down to is that an asset is something you have. A debit s something recorded on the debt side of an account book-something you haven't. The fact that banks are allowed to record a minus as a plus and then multiply it to be yet even more is criminal. The interest payments alone owed to private banks on any nations' National Debt are mathematically impossible to put in the black. This is as true for the U.S as it is for Nigeria and Mexico, while the significant difference will be that as Americans or Frenchmen experience high interest rates, higher taxes, rising unemployment and increased crime, the world to the south is experiencing famine and civil war! The tax-paying public stand as guarantors while spuriously created "wealth" is used by the banks. This simple math is damn easy to understand, yet remains obfuscated to nearly everyone. Further leverage is added by the bank's ability to raise or lower interest rates: increasing or decreasing the amount of capital in circulation. (The Federal Reserve Bank, privately owned and controlled and not to be confused with Fed. Government, sets the prime interest rate that all other major lenders follow)

 

w

alking back from Bloomsbury

            along Great Russell Street

past Cavendish Square's old Georgians

through London's prime real estate

City boast highest repo rate in Europe.

Each hour a home lost:

"To kill a man

with a club or sword?"

            "No difference."

"With a club or system of government,"

asked Mang Tsze?

"No difference," said King Hwuy.

            Economics! Says Ezra, and

tantamount to murder wrote Cato,

a century B.C. drove the s.o.b.'s

out of the temple: first pogrom

            before the Church lost her will.

 

Bloomsbury is that wonderful old section of London where the British Museum library is located. Many scholars have done their research under that laurelled dome, sat in the local cafes, frequented the now famous bookshops and taken rooms in nearby rooming- houses. Unequivocally an area imbued with tradition.

           Great Russell Street runs past the museum and on across the Tottenham Court Road. Further along, by a bit of zig-zagging through 16^th and 17^th century mews and alley ways you come upon Cavendish Square, built during the Georgian are. (The four dubious Georges ruled Great Britain from 1714-1830.) The square remains one of London's elegant residences. While standing in sharp contrast to rotten brickwork in city slums, the variance to the old world elegance here is made with reference to recently disclosed statistics from BBC-TV special report on the catastrophic number of middle income families that lost their homes through foreclosures during the past year. The rate being a horrific one every hour for the entire year (1992) in the U.K.

            The rhetorical dialogue from "To kill a man" is from the Book of Menicus (Mang Tsze), the ancient sage who lived a hundred years after Confucius and continued in the great master's tradition. Cato, the younger, roman statesman and scholar, 94-45 B.C., opposed Julius Caesar and was known for his incorruptible honesty. His view was that usury (that word to stand for not only the taking of interest on money but all manipulative cheating that arises from its abuse) was tantamount to murder and should be punished accordingly. Cato wrote that a hundred years before Christ drove the moneylenders out of the temple where he taught.

(A pogrom: forceable ejection or persecution of an undesirable group within a society.) Numerous pogroms were conducted, often by official decrees, throughout the history of Europe. Some of the most famous often involved Jews, though certainly not all.

One could insist that it was a Jewish temple where Jesus taught, while the important point inferred was that if there was a persecution (of the moneylenders) it was, I pray, for a reason. Not wanting to read more than what is implicit by first pogrom one simply is aware that there were others. This can become sticky, for some of the more well known pogroms, particularly in England, involved Jews. That for these too there very well were reasons and that they can be connected to the infamous practises of money lending at shocking rates (see Shakespeare's Shylock) compounds the problem. Popular history tells us that as the Jews were denied access to other more honourable areas of trade and craft, the only job available to these poor wandering immigrants from the Russian steppes was to become bankers and stockbrokers. (The law of usury, forbidden the Christians by their Canon Law, conceded some ground towards removing the barrier (or at least push it back) by Calvin (1509-64). Of course, it is vehemently prohibited by the Law of Moses and appears as the vile word neschek in the Hebrew scripture.) If by consensus it was true that no other opportunities other than money lending and pushing junk bonds were available in the past, it certainly is not the case today.

 

c

utting across to Hyde Park, walk quietly

            in dark afternoon.

London sundown by half four

            Statuesque chestnuts stand shrouded in

            Night air as warm friends in a cold January

            Coming all this way to live her tragedy.

                        Beauty not lost in battle.

 

            A rendezvous at the Cafe Flo

            a door opens with a warm glow bursting

            against a cold face recovering

            an hours walk from B.M. to Kensington cafe

            Guardian's HEADLINE spells no relief

            from late Robber Max Smell's buggering British public

"Waal.... I'id sug-jest

"a commemorative...yurinal

eerected in iz memree."

            Instead a shrine

                        on top of Mt. Zion

where already fetid flesh was flown

within hours of being dredged up like a sunk'n sow

                        (off the Canary Isles)

now (questionable) remains in Sepulchre of gold

            guarded by Geryon,

three-headed beast previously employed

In Dante's 8^th circle of Hell, London WC1,

Watchtower over Sodom, overlooking the Thames-

Usurers, sodomites, committers of fraud and

            Defilers of Art and Religion

Contra Naturam: against natural increase

            and the abundance of nature.

 

In the Name of God the Most Merciful the Compassionate

 

            "Attacking false systems merely harms ya"

                                    Spoke Kung-fu-Tzse,

            As he made his way

                        On a well trodden path

            By the light of a prophet which preceded him

                        Yet who would be born after.

 

            The Guardian, a well known London rag, provides an obvious pun on 'spells' as does Pound by frequently misspelling the Rothschild' name. On such choice spelling was Stinkschuld in Canto LII. Schuld in Deutch denotes debt, something the odious Rothschild's were aptly to make. From Goethe's Faust we have the line Ich heiβe die Schuld, "I am called guilt", revealing a dual meaning with curious connotations. This gives rise to my Max Smell from Maxwell, the nefarious financier that had just left the British public poorer than all previous crimes of theft combined by defrauding the pension-fund accounts of thousands of workers (for companies he owned or controlled). Big Bob's body (weighing in excess 300lbs) was found floating near his yacht, anchored off the Canarie Islands. It was indeed swooped down upon and air-lifted to where it was buried in an impressive mausoleum on top of Mount Zion, one of Israel's holiest sites. Geryon, a three-headed beast found in Greek mythology was used by Dante in his Divine Comedy to guard the eighth circle of hell in which he gathers those condemned for unnatural acts. This brings to a close a often vituperative panoply.

            Kung-fu-Tzse, the non-Latinized pronunciation of Confucius joins to Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets, showing two ends of the same tally-stick, (one of Ezra's well liked metaphor's) that indicated that great men of knowledge, however separated by continents or cultures, would be in accord with one another.

T

he master Kung collected the odes

            And put them in order.

He gave the words "order" and

 "prefer your brother."

 Respect ole folks and bring the youngns near.

100 years later Menicus proclaims: "ditto, I'll have the same"

And the granaries were maintained.

The channels of distribution un-clogged

            From the fat of hoggers:

Moneyswine that suck off all healthy trade.

                             The toa/way is clear

 Toa as intransitive verb is (to) process

Which is how Uncle Ez, neo-Kung-fu-Tzsian used it.

         Muhammad, peace be upon him, brought

                        A live transaction    دين

NOT STATIC religion as State

"It's getten late, boys

            "lets not sit around

                     "thinking about the hereafter

                       "there is a heck-of-a lot of work to do"

"This hella-hole," seza Danny, "ainta noa place...."

 

 to show

    make clear

            manifest

                        The market is like the mosque

            Keep it clean from impurity, i.e., usury

               No special privilege in opportunity to trade.

            Given whole earth to pray on

                        No need to pay rent on a bank note

            He, God bless him, gave folks a free market place

That they could seek their provision without impediment.

            Again, no need to pay rent for space to buy and sell

                                                oR

                        for purchasing power

            all of which gets added on to the cost!

            Which is more damn-it then folks earn

So debt is, sprout you bumpkin, made incumbent when the former (fortemente)

            Is abandoned for latter

 "Gosh paw this surn heck don't sound like ree'ligin"

             "Hygiene son. It's about keepn clean"

 

            "I have brought the great ball of crystal:

                                    Who can lift it?

            Can you enter the great acorn of light?"

 

      Questions, ladies and gents, that still need answers. Needs a people with a prayer and the gall to do it.

           

T

hen let the knot untie and wash ashore

            pearls scattered upon staried sands,

            that we might read the ideogram's

ancient story written in flesh blades of sea-grass

                        bent like bird's feet gone past.

           

            A hundred dinghies drift into the bay with

                                    Red lanterns lit to Adonis

                        from the altar of a grain goddess.

            The old women of winter draped in Demeter's shawl

                        Stand in doorways looking out to sea

Where long-ago husbands lay buried

 beneath the ocean bed.

 

French farmer's crops left to rot, while

unsold Spanish potatoes are

            banned from the poor in Plaza Mayor

            To protect the price of subsidized imports

                        dumped in supermarkets:

            "Monopolists, obstructers of knowledge

                        obstructers of distribution,"

                                    Getting fat during lean years.

 

So I'll coil this rope 'round my forearm

                        And take leave to Genoa Bay

To find work and the woman

with Circe's hair 'n emerald eyes

            Not go home to die

in frost bitten New England pond

no not by a long shot,

            I've got plenty more work 'n' days.

Only trouble is the money's no good

Not worth the paper and taxed before your sweat dries.

            If I could find that grotto

            where the hearty women serve mellow wine

in honour of Odysseus

            and workmen throw down their silver

for their evening libation

                before tak'n on home to rest

                        in the soft nest of night planting deep

                        the shoot of tomorrow's harvest.

 

Awake! Awake! from the dark grape grey

of sea-cliff waves capped in ocean foam

bursting in suspended sunlight like falling stars

                                                upon the sand.

            Go back weary traveller to Ithaca or Providence,

                        back to your native birches bent beneath

 the weight of freshly fallen snow.

As the first gold thread of dawn was drawn

                                                across the horizon

He awoke upon the beach, naked, alone. She

Pallas Athene appeared

Out of sea-mist, white with a pilgrim's tunic edged

 in indigo, she presented to him.

            Scented he, the sailor, prepared for prayer

The rush of blood brought back his colour

   And as his pallor vanished so did she, Pallas Athene

 

                        He stood

                                                            and bowed

then prostrated

            Before the Majesty and Beauty of All Existence

 

            peace               peace               peace

            until the rising sun shone high above the horizon.

 

 

 

Our friend makes his way towards the town to find his son, Telemachus, and raise an army.

 

                       

POSTSCRIPT

 

The crime of usury is not and has never been one based on race.

            "beyond race and against race"

                    From Addendum for C, written in 1941

                                 From the Cantos of Ezra Pound

 

     This is not an apology (by Pound or myself) for not having subjected ones work to the procrustean bed of political correctness. The Rothschild and Sassons were who they were, as were the JP Morgans and Metevskys. Maxwell, Milken and Soros, all thieves of one sordid sort or another, who were willing to turn a profit at any cost. Today the people of Chile, Iraq or Poland - share the all too common fate of dangerously being in a land made safe for democracy and capitalist investment.

      And it certainly is not - my intention to see this serious matter further obfuscated by emotionally charged attitudes towards race. Nor, if it is after all necessary to be so damn Wilfred S. BLUNT, is it acceptable that the crime remains protected behind the highly charged web of racial-slur.

 

 

 

 

Ideogram: Fidelity to the given word.

 The man here standing by his word.

 

 

First appeared 1996, London, Newport

For Hasan

Ses Ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher.

                From L'Albertos by Charles Baudelaire